Fake news or true lies? Reflections about problematic contents in marketing

Scholars in different scientific fields and practitioners are analyzing the rise of production and diffusion of fake news and problematic information that is rapidly contaminating the digital world.

Corresponding author:

Giandomenico Di Domenico, Faculty of Business and Law, University of Portsmouth, Office 3.09, Portland Building, Portsmouth PO1 3DE, UK.

Email: giandomenico.didomenico@myport.ac.uk

Introduction

Fake news, defined as "news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers" (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017, p. 213), has just recently gained scholarly attention predominantly in the fields of journalism, psychology, and political sciences. Less is done empirically in the marketing and consumer behavior literature, with some recent and few exceptions (e.g., Chen & Cheng, 2019; Peterson, 2019; Talwar et al., 2019; Visentin et al., 2019).

Fake news represents only one...

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